Interdisciplinary Arts 0282 - Dynamics of Displacement

Creative representations can evoke powerfully the conditions of disenfranchisement, marginalization and survival that often mark people's displacement from familiar cultural contexts. Being attentive to the dislocations and challenges of re-anchoring in foreign cultural settings alerts us to complexities of migration - human realities behind how it is often evoked in political discourse and the media. This course will explore novels and films tracing experiences of displacement and migration - bringing into focus visualizations of home ground which people feel they HAVE to leave, the complex experiences of transition and arrival in unfamiliar places - and the blindnesses in juxtapositions of different worlds and the attitudes of reception. Students will research background to the 'stories' explored, write responses to films, seek experiences of migration in their own networks, complete a final critical paper and a creative project combining different mediums.

Independent Work Writing and Research Multiple Cultural Perspectives Division II students only.